Research Questions
Love
What love asks of you, and what it forgives.
Opening your questions…
Research Questions
Love
What love asks of you, and what it forgives.
16 questions
Where to begin
Can you choose who you love?Falling in love sounds like something that happens to you. Staying in love sounds like a decision. Arranged marriages bet on the second.Pick one of 3
- Can you love someone you don't respect?Care, admiration and respect usually travel together. Sometimes you are left with only the first.Pick one of 4
- Do you owe your parents anything for raising you?You never asked to be born; they chose to raise you. The philosopher Jane English argued that grown children owe their parents no debt, only what love between friends would ask.
- Do you want to be loved, or to be preferred?Rousseau separated loving yourself from needing to rank above others in someone's eyes. Being loved and being chosen over others feel alike until they come apart.
- If love can't be equal, would you rather be the one who loves more?In Auden's poem the speaker would rather love the stars than be loved more than he loves, and imagines going on when they are gone.
- If someone you love committed a serious crime, would you turn them in?The Duke of She boasted that in his country a son would testify against a father who stole a sheep. Confucius answered that where he came from, fathers cover for sons and sons for fathers, and that this is what uprightness looks like.Pick one of 4
- If the person you love changed completely, would you still love them?Loyalty through change tests whether love is a response to valuable qualities or a commitment to someone who can lose them.
- Is anything unforgivable?Some people forgive a murderer in court. Others never forgive a friend who insists they did nothing wrong.Pick one of 4
- Melted into oneIf Hephaestus offered to melt you and the one you love into one, would you say yes?
- Should you put your own people first?You can save someone you love or five strangers, but not both. Almost everyone would save their own; impartial arithmetic says five is more than one.
- What did a friend do that showed you that you could live differently?Another person's example can make a possibility available without offering advice.
- What do you know about someone you love that you could never prove?Intimacy can produce knowledge that is difficult to make available to an outsider.
- What do you still do for someone who will never do it back?A repeated act of devotion can carry meaning even when it no longer expects a response.
- What is love?It has been called a fever, a decision and a kind of attention. What is love?
- What real listening allowsDescribe a time someone listened without preparing their answer while you spoke. What did that let you say or think that ordinary conversation would not?
- Would you let it speak for you?Suppose a machine could read the people you love better than you can — their moods, what they're not saying, when to push and when to stay quiet. Would you let it script your hardest conversations with them?Pick one of 4
